Compensating FG when overshooting OG?

anybody ever do that before? I know you could do a variety of things to fix the OG, but what about just leaving it as is and taking away from the FG?

for example, recipe calls for OG 1.050 and FG of 1.010.
drunken homebrewer doesn't pay attention to his recipe and lands at 1.060. How about calling it done at 1.020 instead? what effect would it have? I know that if I bring it down to intended FG then i just have a stronger beer and i dont win any awards, and taste may be a little drier. more curious about compensating and stopping at 1.020.

cheers.

edit....I actually did this on my orange pale ale and added more water to my boil, but i was contemplating just leaving it at 1.060 and stopping at 1.023 vs 1.013. My OG was supposed to be 1.050.

It should finish around 1.012-1.013ish, depending on the yeast strain. Stopping the fermentation early is something I have never done - the beer obviously can't be bottle conditioned if you do this. Adding 10 points to the FG if you overshoot your OG by 10 pts will give you a much sweeter beer. Instead of keeping the difference between OG and FG constant, try to keep your attenuation constant - that should get you closer to what you expected from the original beer.

I usually just dilute the wort with extra water if I overshoot my OG significantly.

Since it looks like you keg, you could in theory kill off the yeast and force carb it, but there's a couple issues I can think of with stopping a fermentation early. First there's the fact that you're going to end up with a sweeter beer than you would otherwise. A 5% beer with an FG of 1.013 isn't going to taste the same as a 5% beer with a FG of 1.023. I'd also think you would have issues with being able to replicate a recipe if you decided you like it. You'd have to keep a really close eye on the fermentation and make sure you stop it at the same spot, otherwise you'll have a different beer than you did before. I think this is probably why you would normally dilute before fermentation instead... plus you end up with more beer that way.

Agree with above posters. The gain in sweetness with an FG of 1.020 vs 1.010 is going to be a much much greater deviation in the beer flavor, then the additional alcohol you'd have by letting it finish out where it will naturally will, likely somewhere in the 1.011 to 1.013 range.

If it is a super critical issue to you for some reason, the better bet would be dilluting the wort to 1.050-ish with pre-boiled water.

Another thing to mention is your IBU's will differ due to lower utilization of hops because of the higher pre-boil gravity.